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“Don’t you make believe, Hedwig,” Herr Sohnstein continued, “that if you go off after promising yourself to me and marry another fellow, that I’ll take care of him when he’s sick, and set him up in business when he gets well, and wind up by giving him a first-class funeral; and don’t you get it into your head that I’m going to adopt any of your children that are not mine too–for I’m not a saint already, even if Andreas is.”

To which general declaration Aunt Hedwig replied, with much spirit, that in the first place Herr Sohnstein had better wait until she promised to marry him–or to marry anybody, for that matter–before he took to preaching to her; that in the second place it was unnecessary for him to declare that he was not a saint, since only a deaf blind man would be likely to take him for one; and that in the third place he would do well to save his breath to cool his broth: at which lively sally they all laughed together very comfortably.

With these good friends Andreas consulted in all important matters relating to Roschen’s well-being. Aunt Hedwig’s practical advice in regard to clothing and food and general care-taking was of high value in the early years; and it was Gottlieb’s suggestion, when the time came for beginning the sowing of seeds of wisdom in her small mind, that Roschen should go with his own Minna to the school where the Sisters taught; and of a Sunday the children went also together to be instructed by the Redemptorist Fathers in the way of godliness. So these little ones grew in years and in knowledge and in grace together, and towards each other they felt a sisterly love.

Insensibly, too, as Roschen grew out of childhood into girlhood, her attitude towards her adoptive father changed. In the great matters of her life he still cared for her, planning always for her good, and withholding from her nothing suited to her station in life that money could buy. In the matter of her music, Aunt Hedwig declared that he was positively extravagant; yet accepted in good part his excuse that a voice so beautiful deserved to be well trained. It was her mother’s voice alive again, he said; and as he spoke, Aunt Hedwig saw that there were tears in his eyes. But while Andreas still continued the larger of his parental duties, in the smaller matters of every-day life his adopted daughter now cared for him; so beginning to pay the debt (though to neither of them, such was their love for each other, did any thought of debt or of payment ever occur) that she owed him for all his goodness to her and to her dead father and mother in the past.

In truth, it was a pretty sight to see Roschen first beginning to play at keeping house for her father–for so she always called him–and then, in a little while, keeping house for him most excellently in real earnest. Here, again, the good qualities of Aunt Hedwig came to the front, for to her intelligent direction was due the rather surprising success that attended Roschen’s ambitious attempt to become so early a hausfrau. Time and again was a great culinary disaster averted by a rapid dash on Roschen’s part from her imperilled home to the bakery, where Aunt Hedwig’s advice was quickly obtained and then was promptly acted upon. And if sometimes the advice came too late to avert the catastrophe–as on that memorable and dreadful day when Roschen boiled her sausage-dumplings without tying them in a bag–the lessons taught by calamitous experience caused only passing trouble, and tended, in the long-run, to good.

Indeed, by the time that Roschen was sixteen years old, and had so far passed through her apprenticeship that she no longer was compelled to make sudden and frantic appeals to Aunt Hedwig for aid, the little household over which she presided so blithely was very admirably managed; and it certainly was as quaint and as pretty an establishment as could be found anywhere upon the whole round globe. Whoever entered the little shop was greeted with such a thrilling and warbling of sweet notes that all the air seemed quivering with music, and the leader of the bird choir was a certain wonderful songster that Andreas had named the Kronprinz, and for which he repeatedly had refused quite fabulous sums. Andreas himself had bred the Kronprinz, and had given him the education that now made him such a wonder among birds, and that made him also of such great value as an instructor of the young birds whose musical education was still to be gained. After his adopted daughter, Andreas held this bird, and justly, to be the most precious thing that he owned.